February 10, 2014

Kerri Bradford Studio: Things That I Always Love

Happy Monday everyone! I have a new layout up over at Kerri Bradford Studio today that I'm excited to share with you. I've been sitting on this one for a while, just waiting for the go-ahead to share.

With Valentine’s Day sneaking up on us, I was in the mood to create some sort of “love” themed layout. I thought I would do something a little different than a normal love layout, and created an all-about-me type of layout without any photos. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but I a big fan of doing photo-less layouts when it comes to all-about-me layouts.

A big reason is that I don't have a ton of photos of myself laying around, and I also don't always have photos that go with what I am trying to document. I love that it really lets you “play” and have fun with the page, while not worrying about fitting in photos or trying to match them to your products.

I took this screenshot to share on Instagram, as I was in the beginning stages of planning out my page. When I'm incorporating lots of Silhouette cuts, I love to sort of "sketch" out my page right there in the Silhouette software. If I have photos, I will pull those in so that I have a good idea of how to size things. For this page, I just created a 5x7" box to represent where my journaling block would go.

Doing this allows you to get all of your cuts just the right size to get the look you want. A lot of times, if I don't have a set idea of what I'm doing on a page, I will just guesstimate how big I want my titles or other die cut elements. I can usually make whatever I cut work. But I love knowing exactly what my plan is, and then have everything be the perfect size for what I had in mind.

I started out with my favorite circle background from the Background Basics kit. In my original planning, I was just going to cut two smaller pieces, to go on either side of my journaling block. I actually ended up cutting a full 12x12" circle background from the blue dotted patterned paper, knowing that I could use the leftovers for other projects.

I also decided that I also wanted to have the circle background on the right side of the page, just to add a little something to the white cardstock background. I love the look of white die cuts on a white background, as it adds a nice subtle interest to the page, without overwhelming whatever else you have going on with other papers, embellishments, etc. This ended up giving me one side of the page for my title and embellishments and one side of the page for my journaling.

Because I had quite a few patterned papers that I wanted to include on the page, I used the circle ring cut from the This & That: School kit to cut circles of varying sizes from the different papers and then pieced the inner circles and the rings together using different paper combinations. All of the patterned papers (with the exception of the aqua ticket patterned paper, which is from Dear Lizzy) and the chipboard pieces are from Heidi Swapp's new Hello Today collection, found at Michaels.

For my journaling block, I created a 5x7" text box in my Word document, so that I could be sure my journaling all fit nicely in the space that I had allowed (since it was the last thing I added to the page). I listed out a few things that I especially love these days, and then wrote out a sentence or two about each thing. I added little coordinating enamel dots next to each item on the list, and also sprinkled some of the same enamel dots on the right side of the page.

For my title, I chose the "love always" from Kerri's February Fourteen kit, and just flip flopped the words so that it read "always love". I adhered the "Love" piece using pop dots to add a little dimension to the page, and then used tiny little alpha stickers from Jillibean Soup to add a little subtitle.

I had also misted the right side of my page before I started adding all of the patterned papers and die cuts. Are you wondering why I chose a dark pink mist? That was an accident on my part. I thought I grabbed my favorite "Piggy Pink" mist (I think that's the name) from Studio Calico, and I had in fact grabbed my "Pretty Pink" mist. I wasn't about to start over, so I just went with it.

I know I was racking my brain trying to think of which things would make my list for this layout. I think the craziness and busy-busy-busy factor of our lives right now shows in what I love these days. Quiet evenings and relaxing weekends are big on my list. That's probably because we're comingoff a long six months of soccer, which took up a lot of our weekends and evenings. Although high school soccer is starting up now, so that will change again soon.

A day to myself. That's definitely a selfish thing. And something I haven't had in ages. But it's also something that I really, really need every now and then. It is truely amazing what I can get accomplished when I have a day to myself with no one around. It usually involves me doing a lot of work stuff. But without little ones running around, or trying to do two jobs at once. I'm pretty sure one of these days will be worked into my schedule soon!

I have to agree with EVERYTHING on your list. I don't even remember the last time I had quiet time in the evening or a whole day to myself. There are times when there is only one kid at home, but never a time when there are NO kids at home. LOVE your layout, my friend.